YOLISA MKELE | We’re all just stoned apes with Wi-Fi

You know what’s funny? If you put on a tinfoil hat and harangue people about teen social media usage, you’ll run into a peculiar type of brick wall. Though phones seem to be the reason behind rising suicide rates, decreasing self-worth, ADHD and depression, everyone agrees that putting the pocket computers down is not the way forward. When you bring this up, a concerned millennial will say, “Oh shame, this is how the kids interact nowadays”, before launching into a sermon about how disinfecting the entire internet is somehow easier than simply putting the dopamine box away.

This sort of pious hand-wringing about phones isn’t just restricted to those with undeveloped frontal lobes. Look about you — everyone talks a big game about digital detoxes and unplugging, but would probably miss the rapture because they were too busy doom scrolling. If you bumped into someone who woke up and the first thing they did every day was take a swig of the beer lying next to their head, you’d be concerned. If someone you knew did crack for nine hours a day (the average amount of screen time for most South Africans), you would probably nudge them away from the pipe and towards a hearty meal and a shower.

There’s a reason for this, a sort of unspoken truth behind why we are so happy to virtue signal about the perils of digital addiction but have zero intention of putting the cyber tik down: Addiction is cool. It is hard wired into us as a society.

If you are a conspiracy theorist who also goes in for a bit of evolution, then you may be familiar with the “Stoned Ape Theory”. If not, buckle up. The story goes that once upon a time, one of our prehuman ancestors (let’s call him Rob) was monkeying about in the forest when he happened upon some mushrooms, the magical sort. He popped some in his mouth and carried on about his day. By the time he got home, Rob was talking all about being one with the divine feminine and explaining how you could eat pi forever. This made him popular with the ladies and — conversely — unpopular among some of the gents. Jealous of this newly-minted mack daddy, they found his little mushroom patch, partook and voilà, consciousness was born.

Another version of this has Rob and his mates eating a whole lot of fermented fruit and getting home in a state that their partners thoroughly did not approve of. The point is, humans have enjoyed being addicted to stuff for as long as there have been humans. Two thousand eight hundred years before they turned Christ into the world’s best-selling piece of wall art, Chinese emperors were smoking weed. Sex addictions have started wars that Greeks would write epic poetry about — and the one thing older than gambling is prostitution.

When you’re drunk in a room full of drunk people, everyone just seems as if they’re having a lot of fun.

What’s more, not all addictions come in the form of vices. People get addicted to work, each other, shopping, tattoos, religion, exercise, pulling out their hair, biting their nails, drinking water and eating sugar. People get hooked on being the best, the most famous, on altruism. Whatever the addiction is, we can’t get enough of that rush of blood to the head. Periodically, we have to give a few addictions the scarlet letter treatment so that everyone has someone to whisper about, but we’re all head over heels crazy about something. We need it. Especially in the modern age. Addictions are just so much fun — a relief from the tedium of waking up, living and going to sleep every day, day in and day out.

Life is the longest thing any of us will ever do and it turns out that you need something to help pass the time. We may all want to sit here and be sanctimonious about having our faculties and experiencing life unfiltered, but that vibrating box in your pocket betrays you. Besides, part of what makes digital addiction so insidiously delicious is that everyone is doing it, so it’s hard to spot its effects. When you’re drunk in a room full of drunk people, everyone just seems as if they’re having a lot of fun. The effects are there, though — misinformation, mental health issues, increasing societal polarisation, Elon Musk. The consequences of our digital drunkenness are plain as day.

But why stop? To quote Baudelaire: “You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it. Be drunk so as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth. But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.”